[ebann413]

Hey everyone,

Ended up staying up late tonight since I have been sleeping a lot to avoid going many places or having to speak to people. I’m wondering if anyone else is experiencing this frightening symptom. First, for me time is happening VERY slow as if I’m picking up on every single detail within every single second that passes by. For me this means when I am around other people, watching people on TV or speaking to a friend or a loved one, people’s faces and their expressions seem like they move extremely awkwardly and their facial expressions seem very weird to me. Especially when I look into other people’s eyes. It’s almost like I can’t read people’s faces anymore. Everything seems really confusing to me like when people laugh or begin telling a story, I find myself just focusing on their strange movements and their faces kind of freak me out to the point where my brain literally doesn’t process or interpret anything correctly anymore. Maybe part of it has to do with my emotional numbness too, but I am curious if anyone gets really weirded out by other people, particularly their facial expressions. I find myself analyzing people constantly almost like I pick up on every little micro movement they make but my brain doesn’t register anything correctly. I may also just be hyper focused on everyone else but I can’t stop focusing on this whenever I am anywhere public. And it breaks my reality check every time. I find myself secluding from people and avoiding them and it happens even more in direct conversation. I lose myself in the other persons movements and feel like I’m just way to hyper aware of them. Even loved ones seem “strange” to me or foreign. Is anyone else experiencing this almost hallucination of people and their movements?

 

[WorryGirl]

Sounds like derealization... Other people and your surroundings seem 'weird'. I only have this when it comes to objects/ the outside. Everything seems flat and colorless. Everything has a 'horror film' filter, dark and strange... I've read online that some people actually see their loved ones as 'monsters', twisted faces etc. Your mind can play some awful tricks on you.

 

[Trith]

Hey everyone,

Ended up staying up late tonight since I have been sleeping a lot to avoid going many places or having to speak to people. I’m wondering if anyone else is experiencing this frightening symptom. First, for me time is happening VERY slow as if I’m picking up on every single detail within every single second that passes by. For me this means when I am around other people, watching people on TV or speaking to a friend or a loved one, people’s faces and their expressions seem like they move extremely awkwardly and their facial expressions seem very weird to me. Especially when I look into other people’s eyes. It’s almost like I can’t read people’s faces anymore. Everything seems really confusing to me like when people laugh or begin telling a story, I find myself just focusing on their strange movements and their faces kind of freak me out to the point where my brain literally doesn’t process or interpret anything correctly anymore. Maybe part of it has to do with my emotional numbness too, but I am curious if anyone gets really weirded out by other people, particularly their facial expressions. I find myself analyzing people constantly almost like I pick up on every little micro movement they make but my brain doesn’t register anything correctly. I may also just be hyper focused on everyone else but I can’t stop focusing on this whenever I am anywhere public. And it breaks my reality check every time. I find myself secluding from people and avoiding them and it happens even more in direct conversation. I lose myself in the other persons movements and feel like I’m just way to hyper aware of them. Even loved ones seem “strange” to me or foreign. Is anyone else experiencing this almost hallucination of people and their movements?

People feeling foreign is a classic of DP in my opinion. About faces I don't have exactly that, but I have a similar effect sometimes. Please tell me if this is like what you feel. Sometimes I interpret the structure of the face wrong. The image itself is not distorted, but like I start to interpret the person's nostrils as their eyes for examples, so it looks like all their face is happening at the bottom of their actual face and the rest is discarded. Or I see them from an angle, and my brain interprets the face as facing me, but it's only half a face. The nostrils becoming the eyes happens more often when people have facial hairs, like a goatee, somehow my internal facial recognition seems to have troubles with that. And when it happens, their real eyes seem a bit dead, because they are not interpreted as eyes anymore, so while my eye interpretation computing power is focused on nostrils, the actual eyes are treated as any other body part and don't convey any life. It's very weird. It happens mostly when I am listening to someone talking for a while. It's not really causing any problem for me, and it is often a kind of comical effect. In general it doesn't make me misinterpret people's expressions. Also it happens as clusters. Sometimes it doesn't happen for months, and then it happens sometimes for a month again.
Another thing is that I am not very good at recognizing or memorizing faces. It happened just a few times that I mistook someone for someone else, but sometimes I doubt a lot, and it makes me uncomfortable because I don't want people to think I don't care about them to the point of confusing them with someone else.

 

[Samzone]

I remember vividly the first time I had dp/dr. I had a panic attack the first time I ever smoked weed at 19 and I just silently left my group of friends I had smoked with. I was so high and derealized that I barely knew where I were. I managed to find my way home and when I saw my mother in the doorway, I felt like I didn’t know her. It was so scary and painful to look at her in this state that it triggered another panic attack, which had me turning on my heels and running away.

I can relate to your symptom but i’m telling you that you must challenge it. Keep seeing people, no, see people more! This is only a symptom of DP that makes it hard for us to read people because we cant read ourselves! We use other people as mirrors to reflect our own personality, so isolating yourself with dpdr is literally the worst thing you can do imo.

Socializing is the main thing that is helping me heal right now and healed me when I had dpdr 3 years ago.